histofthought1

378 Economic thought before Adam Smithand his able student, Archbishop Fenelon in the late seventeenth century, tothe physiocrats and Turgot in the late eighteenth, was to convert the ruler.The liberals were well placed to pursue the strategy of what might becalled their projected 'revolution from the top'. For they were all highlyplaced at court. Archbishop Fenelon placed his hopes in the dauphin, rearingthe duke of Burgundy as an ardent classical liberal. But we have seen thatthese carefully laid plans turned to ashes when the duke died of illness in1711, only four years before the death of Louis himself.A half-century later, Dr Quesnay, again working through a king's mistress,this time Madame de Pompadour, used his position at court to try to convertthe ruler. Success in France was only partial. When Turgot, who agreed withthe physiocrats on laissez-faire, became finance minister and started puttingsweeping liberal reforms into effect, he quickly ran into a wall of entrenchedopposition that removed him from office only two years later. His reformswere angrily repealed. The leading physiocrats were exiled by King LouisXVI, their journal was quickly suppressed, and Mirabeau was ordered tocancel his famous Tuesday evening seminars.The physiocrats' strategy proved a failure, and there was more to thefailure than the vagaries of a particular monarch. For even if the monarchcould be convinced that liberty conduced to the happiness and prosperity ofhis subjects, his own interests are often to maximize state exactions andtherefore his own power and wealth. Furthermore, the monarch does not rulealone, but as the head of a ruling coalition of bureaucrats, nobles, privilegedmonopolists and feudal lords. He rules, in short, as the head of a power elite,or 'ruling class'. It is theoretically conceivable but scarcely likely that a kingand the rest of the ruling class will rush to embrace a philosophy and apolitical economy that will end their power and put them, in effect, out ofbusiness. It certainly did not happen in France and so, after the failure of thephysiocrats and Turgot, came the French Revolution.In any event, the physiocrats did manage to convert some rulers, thoughnot the monarch of France. Their leading disciple among the rulers of theworld - and one of the most enthusiastic and lovable ones - was CarlFriedrich, margrave of the duchy of Baden (1728-1811) in Germany. Convertedby the works ofMirabeau, the margrave wrote a precis of physiocracy,and proceeded to try to institute the system in his realm. The margraveproposed free trade in corn to the German Diet, and in 1770, he introducedthe impot unique at 20 per cent of the agricultural 'net product' in threevillages of Baden. Administering the experiment was the margrave's chiefaide, the enthusiastic German physiocrat Johann August Schlettwein (1731­1802), professor of economics at the University of Giessen. The experiment,however, was abandoned in a few years in two villages, although the singletax continued in the village of Dietlingen until 1792. For a few years, the